{"id":804,"date":"2009-12-08T19:12:37","date_gmt":"2009-12-09T02:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffwallach.com\/?p=804"},"modified":"2011-02-27T15:34:10","modified_gmt":"2011-02-27T22:34:10","slug":"pool-and-drop-a-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/fiction\/804\/pool-and-drop-a-novel","title":{"rendered":"Pool and Drop: A Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The souls of the ancestors are the responsibility of the descendents . . .\u00a0 Forgiveness is vital to life\u2014not for the well being of the forgiven, though, but for the well being of the forgiver.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014- David Mitchell, Ghostwritten<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always as a child.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2014- Cicero<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Prologue<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The river was clear and cool as iced green sun tea.\u00a0 As he looked up from beneath the surface, though, the sky shone turquoise\u2014the color of the stones in a bracelet he\u2019d bought for her one autumn on his way home from the backcountry.\u00a0 The aspens had been golden in the mountains that October, and he\u2019d seen seven coyotes watching over the road at various points\u2014a sure omen; but of what?\u00a0 He\u2019d driven a thousand miles with the bracelet on the seat beside him.\u00a0 He spoke to it occasionally through the late hours when only gospel came through on the radio.\u00a0 He apologized to that bracelet so many times on the way, that years later turquoise was still to him the color of regret.<\/p>\n

He felt regret now, too, in the river, as one of his passengers floated past on the surface above him, legs scissoring just out of reach.\u00a0 Where was the boat, he wondered dreamily.\u00a0 As he kicked toward that shimmering convergence of blue air and green river, arms at his side, purposeful as a bullet, the underwater roar gave way to a single sound, one word: \u201cDon\u2019t.\u201d\u00a0 And the river struck at him.<\/p>\n

He tumbled back into the downward suck of the hydraulic.\u00a0 As it dragged him further from light, air, color, it seemed to say: \u201cBreathe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometimes a hole such as this squeezed you out through a confusion of water and stone to a point of egress.\u00a0 Sometimes it was indifferent\u2014he pushed again toward blue-green, heard again the word \u201cDon\u2019t\u201d\u2014and sometimes it was malicious,\u00a0 a \u201ckeeper\u201d hole, grinding and spinning, taunting you with oxygen bubbles.\u00a0 The only way out of a keeper hole was to descend clear to the bottom where the current still flowed and let if flush you underneath the rapid like a note slipped under a door.<\/p>\n

The bottom, he thought; get to the bottom.\u00a0 He seemed to recall a recent dream\u2014or had it really happened?\u2014in which someone lost to him\u2014his dead grandfather maybe, though that was crazy\u2014had warned him to get to the bottom, the real bottom, not some false one.\u00a0 Is this what he\u2019d meant?<\/p>\n

Rebuffed twice now by the river he felt a stab of anger, nostalgic, like the rhythm of breakers crashing on a dark beach in the night.\u00a0 He mustered another effort, kicking frantically, twisting his torso, pulling at the churning water with both arms, his jaw clamped shut.\u00a0 He felt a coolness that might have been surface. But could not reach it.<\/p>\n

\u201cBreathe,\u201d the river said again as it weighed on him with blunt force.<\/p>\n

His lungs palpated.\u00a0 They burned.\u00a0 He needed to try something different, and try it fast.<\/p>\n

Cold water Maytagged around him as he reached for the zipper of his life jacket and yanked it open before slipping his arms out through the sides.<\/p>\n

This time he pushed down, working with the river.\u00a0 Away from \u201cDon\u2019t\u201d\u2014now he recognized a familiar thickness in the voice, a guttural accent that had once meant home\u2014and down toward \u201cBreathe,\u201d where the water grew dark as onyx and his fingers touched something that did not give way.<\/p>\n

He shimmied toward it, pleading.\u00a0 He lunged.\u00a0 He willed himself toward it before realizing it could not be the river bed: he felt no sand, no gravel, none of the stream-rounded stones that would fit so smoothly in his palm.\u00a0 The river had become cynical, allowing him to fight his way to this false bottom, finally dropping him toward its real channel only when his breath was spent.<\/p>\n

He felt the bursting swell of sweet and long-forgotten rage.\u00a0 He knew that the voice saying \u201cDon\u2019t . . . Breathe,\u201d was his brother\u2019s, and he remembered\u2014a secret he\u2019d kept even from himself for nearly all his life.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Part I: Utah; Oregon<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chapter One<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I reached the mesa top and found my car in the late afternoon.\u00a0 The sun was angling down toward the west, warm still, but the light was growing syrupy, and in the shadows of the junipers the air held a cool tang.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d hiked about thirteen miles since breakfast, stopping twice in the upper canyons to visit ancient ruins tucked into alcoves just under the mesa rim.\u00a0 They were small dwellings, but the mortar work was tight and clean, decorated in places with evenly spaced pebbles.\u00a0 The ancient residents had left bright red imprints of their hands on the sandstone walls of the alcoves.\u00a0 At least five different sizes and shapes of prints, including several tiny ones, arced across the smooth surfaces.\u00a0 I imagined an Anasazi father dipping his son\u2019s\u2019 palms and fingers in the red vegetable dye and pressing them to the wall above their house.\u00a0 I held my own palm and fingers an inch away from one of the larger prints and marveled at the similarities\u2014the knuckle creases, how the fingers tapered\u2014and at our undeniable connection.\u00a0 At how these images reached out from distant history as if to touch us, or to communicate something\u2014but what?\u2014or just to wave good-bye.<\/p>\n

The legacy these people left behind implied the beautiful simplicity of their lives: farming corn in the canyons and on the mesa tops, firing pottery, making art, hauling water from a spring.\u00a0 But it was also a tough living, no doubt.\u00a0 One they\u2019d abandoned suddenly\u2014or been forced to give up\u2014700 years ago, for what reason not even archaeologists can prove.\u00a0 Some experts think the Anasazi didn\u2019t disappear so much as they evolved into the present day Hopi, but if this is true the Hopi aren\u2019t saying.<\/p>\n

Throughout this rugged topography of mesas and redrock canyons, the Anasazi built their homes in the most treacherous and inaccessible places.\u00a0 If you know where to search in the south-facing alcoves, and possess the nerve or the singularity of purpose, or are just plain dumb enough to risk climbing to them, you can find ruins that look just as they did when the Anasazi disappeared into history seven centuries ago.\u00a0 Some of their dwellings hang on cliff edges hundreds of sheer vertical feet above the canyon floor.\u00a0 But don\u2019t all families live with that sort of ever-present danger?<\/p>\n

Had they loved each other in the way we think of it?\u00a0 Giving gifts: a nugget of turquoise, the tenderest deer haunch?\u00a0 Did they pine for each other and rut in the stream bottoms on nights that the moon was dark?\u00a0 Had they thought themselves lucky?\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until this trip\u2014my twelfth year traveling in canyon country\u2014that I realized something: in trying to understand these lost remnants of an uncertain legacy, I was simultaneously struggling to understand my own.\u00a0 To recognize the palm that was reaching out toward me<\/span>.<\/p>\n

I am from a family without history.\u00a0 In our house, we lived on a different sort of edge, where forgetting and concealing (even from ourselves) were team sports that all of us surviving Barretts\u2014my father, my brother Spencer, and I\u2014contributed our special talents to.\u00a0 For most of my life I\u2019d thought it was Mom\u2019s early death that transformed us into keepers of secrets, but I\u2019ve since learned that it was a far older inheritance.<\/p>\n

I leaned my pack against a tire of the old Subaru and opened the back hatch.\u00a0 A blast of trapped heat escaped, releasing the rich smell of coffee, which I never travel without.\u00a0 I\u2019d also left a box of Chips Ahoys in the cooler as a treat for when I\u2019d finished my trip, so I opened them and uncapped a bottle of cranberry-grape juice, and celebrated the completion of another great journey by holding up the bottle and toasting a nearby pinon pine.<\/p>\n

When I drove down off the mesa a short while later, the air was hot and dry and smelled of sage.\u00a0 Dust billowed out behind the car in an endless stream.\u00a0 Heading back toward pavement, I steered with one hand and drank deeply from a milk jug filled with spring water.\u00a0 Time fell away from me, much as the days had fallen away in the canyons.\u00a0 I sang loudly and off-key to an old Lyle Lovett tape, songs about riding ponies on boats and being the man that you are.<\/p>\n

When I tired of the lyrics, I made up my own: songs about desert canyons and solo road trips, strong coffee and the love of good women.\u00a0 Strong women and the love of good coffee.\u00a0 Double lattes, and the women who love them.<\/p>\n

I reached Moab in that moment of perfect balance between dusk and darkness, when the last rays of sun were slipping up the wall of the slickrock mesa outside town and lights had come on in the small houses of the valley just before being necessary.\u00a0 Crossing the bridge over the brown Colorado, I inhaled the cool breath of the water below, the scent of fine silt and vegetation, rich beyond words.\u00a0 In a few days I\u2019d be heading north to another river, the Chinook, up in Idaho, where I work as a whitewater guide for TREC, The River Expedition Company.\u00a0 I could practically taste that clear green water.\u00a0 Its touch on a hot day, when I\u2019d been rowing hard all morning and then dropped over the edge of my boat in a calm stretch, was a river guide\u2019s baptism of coolness.<\/p>\n

Driving into Moab I also felt a perfect balance within, having traveled hard and well down in the canyons, seen a few things, and leached out my body\u2019s toxins in the hot sun and cold pools.\u00a0 I felt sandblasted, pure clean, fully myself as I hadn\u2019t in some time.\u00a0 Giddy with possibility.<\/p>\n

Very soon now I\u2019d take a hot shower at Kate\u2019s, maybe stretch a little, and then change into clean river shorts and a faded tee shirt.\u00a0 We\u2019d have a hot dinner in a cafe and drink a few icy margaritas and probably make love afterwards with the windows open to the desert outside.\u00a0 Then I\u2019d fall backward into that safety of being with a woman I loved.<\/p>\n

On the outer edge of town, a new cinder block motel cluttered the landscape where last year there\u2019d only been desert.\u00a0 The parking lot was full of RVs that an hour ago would\u2019ve all been lined up at the National Park entrance, waiting to be told that the campground was full.\u00a0 I shook my head, trying to be amused rather than cynical.<\/p>\n

And in the next moment I was back in the world\u2014or out of it, as my boatman friends might say.\u00a0 The streets rumbled with open-topped jeeps and bright sport utility vehicles driven by young bucks with multiple piercings, their dusty bikes racked on the back, their blond girlfriends wearing black Lycra shorts and Day-Glo bikini tops, looking hard and tan.<\/p>\n

I took another hit from my water jug as the crush of people around me gunned their engines and waved to each other with just their thumbs and pinkies.\u00a0 Three girls came out of the Kokopelli Quik Market like Charlie\u2019s Angels, carrying six-packs of micro-brewed beer in each hand.\u00a0 Music from the pick-up behind me\u2014some techno grunge thing\u2014made my teeth ache with bass.<\/p>\n

Something plumed up in me as I waited in a line of cars at the first light, and I wondered: was I limber enough to just let this all go?\u00a0 I breathed deep into my belly, the way I do before running a big rapid at high water.<\/p>\n

And then the door of the Cherokee in front of me opened and the driver dumped an ashtray full of cigarette butts into the street.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou FUCKER,\u201d I said and slammed the steering wheel with my palm.\u00a0 I thrust my rig into park and fumbled with the shoulder belt.\u00a0 The Cherokee\u2019s door closed and the vehicle jolted forward.<\/p>\n

I jumped out and stood beside my car, considering: should I just drive forward and ram the Cherokee from behind?\u00a0 Run down the street\u2014traffic was slow enough\u2014and bang on the window and pull the inconsiderate dickhead out, give him a good pummeling right there on the pavement with all the other stupid bastards watching?\u00a0 Or no: better, calmer\u2014maybe scoop up the butts and catch up to the guy, and then say, as I once did to a young guide who\u2019d thrown a cigar butt into the river, \u201cHere.\u00a0 I think you dropped this.\u00a0 By accident.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I stood beside my car in the middle of the main drag, neon streaking the darkness yellow and purple and red, the driver in the Land Rover behind me leaned on his horn.\u00a0 A heavyset kid with a face full of attached metal poked his head out the passenger\u2019s side window and yelled, \u201cCome on, man.\u00a0 Get out the road.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, fuck me,\u201d I said to myself.\u00a0 I got back in the car.\u00a0 I shifted into gear and as the Subaru smoothed forward, I continued pounding on the steering wheel until I was playing a drum solo, and rage ratcheted down to a sharpness I could bear.<\/p>\n

Just past the MacDonald\u2019s and right before the Moqui Motel\u2014with its Slickrock Water Slide and Anasazi Mini-Golf\u2014I turned left off the main drag and continued down a street lined with small houses, many painted in pastels.\u00a0 I took deep draughts of air, visualizing one of my camps down in the canyons last week: a sandy bench just above the streambed with a lone cottonwood tree, its leaves whispering in the wind like rain.\u00a0 Sitting in the car my lower back began to ache, to throb down my leg, though I\u2019d been without pain for days.<\/p>\n

On this side street named for some old, dead Mormon it was quieter already.\u00a0 The air was palpable, perfumed with a flower I couldn\u2019t identify.\u00a0 I know the wild desert plants\u2014yucca, desert holly, globe mallow, penstemon\u2014but I\u2019ve never bothered to learn about the things that people grow in town.<\/p>\n

Kate\u2019s house lay a mile out along rambling streets\u2014a weathered homestead, yellow with light blue trim. She\u2019s wrestled the huge yard into a garden.\u00a0 A stream runs along the far edge of the property.\u00a0 A peacock lives up in one of the big old cottonwoods out back and occasionally broadcasts an eerie laugh track that leaves us giggling.\u00a0 Sometimes, when I\u2019m drifting into sleep, Kate likes to imitate the bird, knowing I\u2019ll always laugh.<\/p>\n

She was sitting on the front steps as I pulled up to the curb, so absorbed in a book\u2014reading with her river headlamp\u2014that she didn\u2019t notice me until I walked across the lawn.\u00a0 She wore a TREC tee-shirt with no sleeves, and a pair of cut-off denim shorts.\u00a0 Her hair was trimmed short, lending a boyishness to her beauty.\u00a0 A blue fleece jacket draped over her shoulders like a fraternity sweater.\u00a0 She knocked over a glass of iced sun tea as she stood.<\/p>\n

We embraced standing on the grass.\u00a0 I moved my hands over her small, strong back and breathed in the scent of her, a sweet grapefruit fragrance.\u00a0 She kissed me hard and grabbed at my dusty, graying hair with both hands.<\/p>\n

\u201cJake Barrett.\u00a0 You smell awful.\u201d\u00a0 She stepped back and smiled, all strong teeth and green eyes and freckled suntan, pretty as a thunderstorm.\u00a0 My unimaginable California girl, with hair the color of summer wheat, a girl right out of an old Bob Seeger song.<\/p>\n

\u201cWow.\u00a0 You\u2019re the prettiest thing I\u2019ve laid eyes on all week.\u00a0 It\u2019s good to see you, Kate Egan.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFlatterer.\u00a0 Pretty as a bag of Chips Ahoys?\u00a0 As a box of mac and cheese?\u201d<\/p>\n

We stood holding hands beneath the gathering dark, trying to remember where we\u2019d left off the last time.\u00a0 Waiting to tumble into comfort again.\u00a0 Crickets mimicked each other from distant hideouts.<\/p>\n

Eventually I went back to rummage through my rig for some clean clothes and a razor and a small stack of juniper wood I\u2019d collected for her up on the mesa as a gift.\u00a0 Chaos reigned in the back of the car\u2014it was what Kate might have called \u2018a total yard sale.\u2019\u00a0 Food boxes and backpacking gear and clean and dirty clothes were all tumbled together, but I found the things I needed and walked back up to the house.<\/p>\n

In the shower I washed off ten days of good Utah dust.\u00a0 The water swirling down the drain was red and cloudy, and I hated to see it go.\u00a0 I washed my hair twice, scrubbed at my arms and legs to see what was dirt, what was sunburn.\u00a0 I felt the citrus sting of cuts and abrasions I\u2019d collected while scaling rocks and slashing through side canyons and climbing up to ruins, looking hard for something that I couldn\u2019t identify and wasn\u2019t sure was discoverable.<\/p>\n

I trimmed my goatee and shaved two weeks of stubble.\u00a0 Stood on the scale out of habit\u2014190 pounds.\u00a0 I like to say that I\u2019m not really stocky, just too short (a micron under six feet) for my weight.<\/p>\n

Kate was lying on her futon bed when I came out with a towel knotted around my waist.\u00a0 I lay down beside her, happy to be surrounded by the things that fill her life\u2014Tibetan prayer flags and the battered cassette deck, old Ry Cooder tapes, field guides and books on river rescue and wilderness medicine, and the old copy of Desert Solitaire that she loaned me on my first visit to the canyonlands more than a decade ago.\u00a0 Against the wall stood half a dozen red plastic milk crates filled with backpacking gear and climbing gear and whitewater river gear: loops of carabiners, rescue lines, life jacket, wetsuit, everything neatly arranged.\u00a0 Kate was getting ready for the river season up in Idaho, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo, how was Juniper Mesa,\u201d she asked.\u00a0 She played with the silver disk I wear on a leather thong around my neck.\u00a0 A boatman\u2019s amulet, supposed to protect you on the water.\u00a0 Kate bought it for me three seasons ago.\u00a0 It\u2019s carved with a copy of petroglyphs from along the Chinook River.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood,\u201d I said, coming back into myself, into the room.<\/p>\n

She smiled like her mind was on something else.\u00a0 She ran her fingers through my hair.\u00a0 She waited a long time before saying, \u201cAnything you want to tell me about?\u201d<\/p>\n

I looked up at the Guatemalan drapery that hung from the ceiling\u2014something she\u2019d bought at the public market in Chichicastenango on a trip we\u2019d taken together one autumn right after we\u2019d finished guiding for the summer.\u00a0 I sipped the clean scent of the desert.\u00a0 The cool breeze tickled my skin.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot sure,\u201d I said.\u00a0 Then, \u201cWell, something.\u00a0 Just not yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

I woke a couple of hours later, just past eleven, groggy, disoriented, happy.\u00a0 Drooling on the soft cotton pillow case, a flowery design that could only have come from Kate\u2019s mother.\u00a0 The moon had skated across the mesa top and disappeared behind it.\u00a0 Kate still lay beside me reading a novel about Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis happens every year,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

I nodded, remembering where I was.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re hungry now,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cUm hmm.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we walk to the Rimrock and you have a big fat hamburger and we drink two margaritas each and then dance slow to a sad Bonnie Raitt song.\u00a0 The cowboys shoot pool and pretend they\u2019re not watching us.\u201d<\/p>\n

I leaned up on one elbow.\u00a0 \u201cThey pretend they\u2019re not watching you.<\/span> You see ten people you know, even though we go to the Rimrock so you won\u2019t see anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neither of us mentioned that we usually came back after that and made love.<\/p>\n

Kate went into the other room and chugged a glass of water while I dressed.\u00a0 We pulled on river sandals and walked to the cafe.\u00a0 As we passed the gallery that shows some of Kate\u2019s work\u2014she paints watercolor landscapes and throws some pottery\u2014I pulled her close to me.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love you, Kate,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

She looked up the street as we walked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know you do,\u201d she said, slipping an arm around my waist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The souls of the ancestors are the responsibility of the descendents . . .\u00a0 Forgiveness is vital to life\u2014not for… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[944163,5612,5613,5614],"class_list":["post-804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","tag-fiction","tag-adventure-fiction","tag-outdoor-novel","tag-environmental-novel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2292,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804\/revisions\/2292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}